Anyone who’s taken Psychology 101 will recall Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, a pyramid-shaped analysis of how humans prioritize their lives. At the most foundational level are food, water, and shelter. Next, there’s physical safety and security. Lastly, several levels up, there’s self-actualization – when individuals come to embody their beliefs about the Good. Though seemingly intuitive, Maslow’s description cannot account for the vast multitudes who have sacrificed comfort and, ultimately, life itself for the sake of higher ideals; those held up as heroes and saints, the highest exemplars of humanity. While our lives are generally ordered by the quotidian, it’s also true that humans are spiritual beings that seek not only material well-being but also moral wholeness and justice. This is true of individuals, but also of nations and civilizations for all of history.
The United States in particular has always had a moralizing streak that was destined to take on an international bent. This should come as no surprise for a nation founded by the Puritans. John Winthrop, a founder of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, famously described the United States as a “city upon a hill” in reference to Matthew 5:14: “You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden.” Ronald Reagan would famously pick up on this in his railing against the Soviet Union, and for good reason: the Cold War was won not only by America’s conventional and nuclear arsenals, but also by the spiritual certainty that there are such things as Good and Evil, that Good must prevail, and that we were on the side of the former. But the coalescing of a nation around shared moral, spiritual values that supersede material considerations is far older than the U.S.
Before the discovery of Göbekli Tepe in southern Turkey, a neolithic archeology site dating to around 9,500 BC, it was uniformly believed that humanity’s transformation from hunter-gatherer communities to agriculture-based societies preceded the development of organized religion and other complex socio-cultural dynamics. But the excavation of Göbekli Tepe turned that assumption on its head. The site, which archeologist Klaus Schmidt described as “the first human-built holy place,” consists of over 20 rings of megaliths, the rings consisting of 10 to 12 megaliths and each megalith weighing between 10 and 20 tons, intricately carved with lions, bulls, foxes, snakes, vultures, and abstract symbols. The site has absolutely no apparent practical purpose besides serving as the world’s oldest temple. For comparison, the megaliths of Stonehenge, a similarly eerie window into ancient spirituality, are of similar size, though much less old, dating to around 3,000 BC.
The fact that such a primitive society could be possessed of the organizational capacity necessary for such a literally monumental endeavor is incredible and invites questions about the role of religion in society. Returning to Maslow’s Hierarchy, religion and spirituality are often thought of as superfluous at best and counterproductive at worst; something to be considered only when the ‘real’ material work of attending to the lower levels of the hierarchy is done. And yet, Göbekli Tepe is a glaring counter-example that attests to the inversion of Maslow’s hierarchy – that the realization of some kind of organized religion was antecedent to the development of civilization at all. A more impoverished context than hunter-gatherers 11,500 years ago could hardly be imagined, and yet they still sought to construct the prehistoric equivalent of a cathedral.
In our own time, it’s a common refrain that the United States has been too idealistic, too moralizing, in international politics these last few decades. What role, if any, does morality have in the international sphere? Shouldn’t we dispense with such immaterial niceties as democracy and human rights and focus on the real question of how to shore up our power base against Russia, China, and Iran? These sentiments, while understandable, miss that both internationally and domestically, morally cogent goals worth striving towards are prior to the mass organization of society necessary to pursue any such grand endeavors. This was true over 10,000 years ago in southern Turkey; it was true in WWII, of which General George C. Marshall remarked that “military power wins battles, but spiritual power wins wars;” and it was true during the Cold War, which Reagan understood better than any of his detractors.
And yet, it being said that all nations necessarily strive towards some kind of moral goal, it’s also true that scarcity inescapably influences our decision-making. In this life, we will never solve every problem nor completely expunge evil from the world and so aspiring to such lofty heights is foolish and even self-defeating. At the same time, in formulating the best possible world American hard and soft power can realistically achieve, the definition of “best” is always contingent on the moral, spiritual underpinnings of our nation. We frequently hear calls to be more “pragmatic,” but this begs the question: pragmatic towards what ends? Matthew 4:4 states that “Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.” To think that nations exist apart from the ethical concerns that animate them is to engage in the same myopathy that sees humans only as homo economicus; beings bereft of concerns beyond the material.
Herein lies the intractable problem that only religion answers: persons, though finite, bound by deteriorating bodies and material scarcity, yearn to stretch towards infinity. The same is true of nations: though constrained by limited resources, they are still defined by shared moral concerns that propel them in ways that cannot be explained by material necessity. The most shining examples of nations doing what they know to be right, like the British Empire abolishing slavery in the 19th century or Americans today working to fight human trafficking and eradicate diseases abroad do not accord with appeals to pragmatism. Sometimes nations aim too high and fail, as in America’s decades-long mission to turn Afghanistan into a democracy. Even so, such failures do not negate the moral striving that has defined civilization since Göbekli Tepe. Morality will always be essential to the national interest because morality has always been essential to being human.